The Right Pundit

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MSNBC’s Chris Matthews saw a nefarious aim behind Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech before a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, claiming his discussion on the Iranian nuclear talks represented nothing less than a “takeover attempt” by a foreign leader.

“Let me get to the heart of this now,” he told host Thomas Roberts. “This man, from a foreign government, walked into the United States legislative chamber and tried to take over U.S. foreign policy.” “Mm-hmm,” Roberts said approvingly.

“He said, ‘You should trust me, not your president, on this,’” Matthews continued. “‘I am the man you should trust, I am your true leader on this question of geopolitics.’”

Following the Netanyahu Address to congress, Dems had a press conference and made sure they brought their White House talking points. First up was Democrat John Yarmuth. He took multiple cheap shots at PM Netanyahu.

Gen. David Petraeus is expected to plead guilty to federal charges to end a probe into whether he provided classified information to his mistress when he was CIA director, according to a U.S. official briefed on the matter.

An announcement about the proposed plea agreement could come later Tuesday.

The New York Times first reported the plea deal talks, which would effectively end the Justice Department investigation.

On September 6, 2011, just days before the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks against the United States, Petraeus was sworn in as the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. A little more than a year later, on November 9, 2012, he resigned from his CIA post, citing personal reasons.

He admitted to having an affair, and the following March apologized for that during a speech at the University of Southern California.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu plans to deliver one of the most controversial speeches to a joint session of Congress by a foreign leader ever, and Vice President Biden and a number of top Democrats won’t be attending.

Netanyahu is expected to criticize the White House’s negotiations on Iran's nuclear program in his March 3 speech. While Biden has cited a scheduling conflict, other Democrats are staying away from the speech to protest what they see as an attack on President Obama.

Congressional Democrats are angry that Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) invited Netanyahu to speak to Congress without first telling the White House. Obama has said he will not meet with Netanyahu during the visit because it will occur two weeks before Israeli elections are set to take place.

Democrats face a difficult decision on whether to attend the address. Many will want to show support for the White House but will be wary of snubbing the leader of an important U.S. ally.

Here is a list of the Democrats who are planning to skip the speech and those who are planning to go.

ISIS has been under attack in the last few days from Twitter, which has quietly suspended at least 2,000 accounts linked to the terror group and its supporters, according to people with knowledge of the operation.

The sites shut down include some of the most important distributors of ISIS messages in a major escalation against ISIS’s propaganda and recruitment efforts, according to J.M. Berger, a terrorism analyst who monitors ISIS online messaging.

"Twitter has been doing a whole lot over the past week. They've slammed them pretty hard, including the official media distribution guys," Berger said. He said 13 of the 16 major ISIS distribution accounts were among those shut down.

Top U.S. security officials previously said ISIS has successfully leveraged social media networks, including Twitter, as powerful recruitment tools to draw in fighters from 90 countries. But a person with knowledge of Twitter’s recent suspension spree said it was not done due to U.S. government pressure -– in fact, he said the U.S. intelligence community would prefer the accounts stay open for intelligence gathering purposes.

House Speaker John Boehner’s office said in a statement Monday that his office is receiving “ten times the number of requests for tickets than there are seats available in the gallery” for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to a joint meeting of Congress.

Boehner will welcome Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the Capitol on Tuesday by giving him a bust of Winston Churchill.

According to the speaker’s office, Netanyahu and Churchill are the only foreign leaders to deliver a speech to a joint meeting of Congress on three different occasions.

Although a small contingent of Democrats, including President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, will not be attending the joint meeting, demand for tickets to the gallery and other viewing locations in the Capitol is high. Such demand for tickets usually happens for events like the president’s State of the Union.

The speaker’s office stated, “Given the ties between America and Israel, it’s no surprise that interest in attending the speech is high"

A delegation of ministers from the new revolutionary regime in Yemen has arrived in Tehran for talks as Iran strengthens its diplomatic grip on another troubled Arab country.

The delegation was sent by the new administration in the northern half of Yemen, led by the former “Houthi” rebels, a Shia militia close to Iran’s Lebanese proxy group Hizbollah.

The Houthis drove the western- and Saudi-backed government out of the capital Sana’a in January and formally seized power earlier this month, prompting Iranian officials to boast that they now occupied “four Arab capitals” - the others being Beirut, Damascus and Baghdad.

Among the first signs of Iran’s new dominance in the country was the announcement on Sunday of 14 new direct flights a week between Sana’a and Tehran, to be run by Yemenia Airways and Iran's Mahan Air.

The triumphal Iranian move into northern Yemen, with the elected and Sunni President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi forced to flee to Aden in the south, has opened the way to a new proxy war in the Middle East.

The Iraqi army, backed by Shiite and Sunni fighters, has begun a major effort to retake Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit from ISIS militants, a likely prelude to a move on the ISIS stronghold of Mosul.

AFP Reported:

Some 30,000 Iraqi troops and militia backed by aircraft pounded jihadist positions in and around Tikrit on Monday in the biggest offensive yet to retake one of the Islamic State group's main strongholds.

"Security forces are advancing on three main fronts towards Tikrit, Ad-Dawr (to the south) and Al-Alam (to the north)," an army lieutenant colonel on the ground told AFP by telephone.

Iraqi forces are also "moving along side roads to prevent Daesh's escape," he said, using an Arab acronym for IS, which has controlled the hometown of executed dictator Saddam Hussein for nearly nine months.

The operation, which is one of the most ambitious undertaken by Baghdad to roll back the gains made by IS last June, began in early morning after being announced by Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi the previous evening.

The army officer said the forces involved in the battle were from the army, police, counter-terrorism units, a government-controlled volunteer group known as the Population Mobilisation units and local Sunni tribes opposed to IS.

Current Wisconsin Governor and 2016 Presidential Candidate hopeful Scott Walker can’t seem to catch a break… least of all from his own party.

On Thursday, Mark Salter — who was a top GOP adviser for 2008 presidential candidate John McCain — took to Facebook to write a scathing article concerning a comment Scott Walker recently made about ISIS. Walker had recently said that if he could handle 100,000 protestors in Madison (Wisconsin), he could certainly handle ISIS.

“If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the world.”

Salter then went on Twitter and made a harsh observation about the potential presidential candidate.

“I want to like him but Scott Walker is kind of a dumb a**.”

The remark about the protestors in Madison was directed at the onslaught of Wisconsinites who flocked to the Wisconsin state capitol after Walker seemingly overnight dismantled the state’s union’s right to collectively bargain

A Russian government owned television station claims it has footage of the murder of a leading opposition politician.

The slaying of prominent Kremlin critic Boris Nemtsov in the heart of Moscow has shocked Russia and the wider world.

His murder, two days before a planned opposition march, has also outraged fellow opposition figures and prompted a slew of speculation over who could be behind it.

Some government critics pointed fingers in the direction of President Vladimir Putin or one of his supporters. State media reported Nemtsov had received threats linked to his stance on the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris.

A "Saturday Night Live" sketch featuring host Dakota Johnson as a teenager leaving home to join ISIS has people on social media wondering whether the sketch went too far in the name of comedy.

Parodying a Toyota commercial where a young woman's father drops her off at the airport to presumably join the military, the "SNL" sketch shows Johnson's father in the sketch telling ISIS, "Take care of her," to which the character replies, "Death to America."